Key Findings
- Central America holds an estimated 7–10% of all known species on Earth in less than 0.5% of its land area, the result of geology, climate, and decades of deliberate conservation.
- At Nayara Tented Camp, a reforestation program turned cleared pasture into a functioning habitat corridor. Sloths returned on their own when the canopy closed.
- In Bocas del Toro, reef, mangrove, and rainforest operate as a single system. Conservation that treats them separately will fail.
Every year on March 3, World Wildlife Day prompts a global conversation about the species we share this planet with. The United Nations established the observance in 2013 specifically to build accountability, not just awareness, around the pressures that push species toward the margins: habitat destruction, illegal trade, climate change, and the compounding effects of human development on the ecosystems that wild animals depend on.
At Nayara, we treat this day as an internal question before it is a public one. We operate inside two ecosystems of global biological significance. The animals that live here, in the canopy above our properties, in the reef below our water villas, in the mangroves that line our island shores, are not amenities. Their presence reflects real ecological conditions. Their wellbeing is both a measure of ours and a responsibility we accepted when we chose to build here.
This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Part 2 covers Chile’s Atacama Desert and Easter Island. Both pieces begin from the same premise: wildlife is not backdrop. It is the thing itself.
The Land Bridge and What It Means
Central America’s extraordinary biodiversity is a consequence of geography. For most of the planet’s history, North and South America were separate continents, each evolving its own fauna in isolation. When the Isthmus of Panama closed roughly three million years ago, the biological exchange that followed was one of the most significant events in the history of life on land. Species moved in both directions. Populations diverged into new forms as they adapted to unfamiliar habitats. Marine species separated as the Atlantic and Pacific became distinct bodies of water.
What remained after that exchange was a narrow strip of land with a disproportionate share of the world’s biological complexity. Costa Rica, with an estimated 500,000 species in a territory roughly the size of West Virginia, contains a larger share of global biodiversity than most continents. The Arenal Conservation Area alone spans over 500,000 acres and climbs from lowland rainforest through cloud forest, functioning as a vertical cross-section of that complexity, stacking distinct ecosystems on top of one another along its volcanic slopes.
Understanding this context matters because it changes the stakes of every development decision. When habitat is fragmented here, the consequences ripple across a web of interdependencies that took millions of years to form. Restoration, correspondingly, is not just about one species or one parcel. It is about reconnecting a system.
Turning Pasture Back into Forest
The land beneath Nayara Tented Camp was cleared pasture when we acquired it. Open, exposed, and ecologically inert. No canopy. No food web. No movement corridors connecting it to the forest edges nearby. We made a decision early on that the property would not simply be built on degraded land. It would restore it.
The process started with species selection. We prioritized fast-establishing native trees that would create canopy quickly and support wildlife simultaneously. Cecropia, a genus that colonizes disturbed tropical land rapidly and produces the leaf matter that sloths depend on, became a cornerstone of the planting program. Over time, as the canopy closed, the conditions that arboreal animals require (continuous overhead pathways, shade-dependent understory, insect communities tied to specific plant hosts) began to return.
Sloths arrived without being introduced. That is the point. When you plant the right trees in the right configuration, the animals follow the food. Two sloth species now live in the canopy year-round, and Nayara’s resident naturalists monitor their movement, condition, and habitat use as part of an ongoing program that informs both conservation practice and guest education. The sloth is not a symbol here. It is a measurable indicator that the restoration is working.
We have written more about how this philosophy, nature as foundation rather than feature, shapes everything we do across our properties in Why Nayara Resorts Is Latin America’s Leading Luxury Brand.
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The Ecological Roles That Actually Matter
Wildlife coverage tends to focus on charisma: size, color, rarity. The species that warrant the most attention are often the ones doing the least visible work. Three animals in the Arenal ecosystem illustrate this.
The toucan family. Keel-billed, chestnut-mandibled, and collared araçarí toucans move through the mid-canopy consuming large fruits that most birds cannot process. As documented by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, these birds are among the most effective seed dispersers in Neotropical forests, carrying seeds in their gut across distances that determine where the next generation of large-seeded trees germinates. Lose the toucans, and you do not just lose the spectacle. You lose a critical mechanism of forest regeneration.
The mantled howler monkey. The IUCN Red List records the Arenal population as stable, which is a conservation achievement worth naming. Howler monkeys are canopy-dependent: they cannot safely cross open ground, which means every break in forest cover is a hard barrier to movement, gene flow, and population health. The canopy corridors Nayara has planted are, among other things, howler monkey infrastructure.
The white-nosed coati. Visible on the forest floor, often dismissed as approachable and unexceptional, coatis are in practice ecosystem engineers. Their foraging behavior turns soil, suppresses insects, and disperses seeds across the undergrowth in ways that shape forest floor composition over time. Ecosystems without adequate populations of mid-level foragers show measurable degradation in structure and diversity.
Bocas del Toro: One System
The standard way to describe Bocas del Toro is as a place where reef, mangrove, and rainforest meet. That framing is convenient but misleading. These are not three ecosystems that happen to share a coastline. They are a single functioning system in which each component is structurally dependent on the others.
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute has studied this system since establishing its research station here in 1998. What that research makes clear is that the causal chains run in every direction: mangrove root systems filter the terrestrial runoff that would otherwise smother reef corals. Reef structures shelter juvenile fish that will eventually feed the dolphins and sharks patrolling deeper water. Rainforest canopy stabilizes soils that, if eroded, would carry sediment into shallow-reef zones and cut off the light that coral requires. Seagrass meadows between mangroves and reef provide the feeding grounds on which sea turtles depend.
Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor and support roughly a quarter of all marine species, a concentration of biodiversity comparable to tropical rainforests. In Bocas del Toro, that global significance plays out at an intimate scale: the reef, mangrove, and rainforest components are stacked so closely that disturbance in any one zone is felt immediately across the others.
Conservation strategies that treat any one of these components in isolation are not conservation strategies. They are delay. At Nayara Bocas del Toro, we operate with a whole-system awareness that shapes decisions about where boats travel, how lighting is managed, what materials enter the water, and when and how guests access sensitive zones.
We explored the science behind how these ecosystems shape human health in Nature-Based Wellness by Colors.
Four Species and What Their Presence Means
Bottlenose and spinner dolphins. Dolphin Bay’s resident populations are among the most reliable indicators of water quality and prey abundance in the archipelago. Dolphins are near the top of the aquatic food chain; their sustained presence means the trophic levels beneath them are functioning at sufficient scale. Their absence or decline would be an early warning of systemic stress that would likely not register in any other visible way until it was already severe.
Leatherback sea turtles. The leatherback is the largest living reptile and one of the most ancient lineages of animals nesting on Bocas del Toro’s beaches, typically between March and July. NOAA Fisheries documents their annual transoceanic migrations spanning thousands of miles; they return to the same Caribbean beaches year after year. Their continued nesting here depends on beach quality, darkness, and the absence of boat traffic and disorienting light that causes females to abort nesting attempts and return to sea.
Nurse sharks. According to the Florida Museum Shark Research Program, nurse sharks are benthic predators that rest on the seafloor during the day and hunt invertebrates at night. Docile and largely uninterested in human divers, they are easy to overlook. Their population density in Bocas del Toro’s shallow reef zones reflects the health of the seafloor communities they feed on, and the absence of the overfishing pressure that depletes them elsewhere. Globally, the IUCN estimates that roughly a quarter of all shark and ray species are now threatened, making healthy populations like those in Bocas a genuine conservation bright spot rather than a given.
Panamanian night monkeys. Research published in the American Journal of Primatology describes the Panamanian night monkey’s dependence on undisturbed habitat and near-total darkness for successful foraging and reproduction. Artificial light at the wrong intensity disrupts their activity cycles and compresses their effective habitat range. Monitoring their presence near the property is one of the ways we track whether our light management practices are working.
From the Forest to the Reef: What Comes Next
The reforestation work at Arenal and the ecosystem stewardship at Bocas del Toro are not separate conservation projects. They are two points on the same continuum. Healthy forests reduce the sediment runoff that suffocates reef systems. Stable soils upstream mean cleaner, clearer water at the shoreline. The canopy corridors we plant on land have direct consequences for the coral thirty meters offshore. Land and sea restoration are not parallel tracks. One feeds the other.
That connection is now guiding an expansion of our work across the Bocas del Toro archipelago into active coral reef restoration: coral nursery programs, heat-resistant propagation, and outplanting on degraded reef structures that, left alone, will not recover within any meaningful human timeframe. We will be publishing a full piece on our expanding partnership with Caribbean Coral Restoration.
What We Are Actually Asking on World Wildlife Day
The United Nations’ framing for World Wildlife Day is consistently future-facing: what does the next generation inherit, and what choices determine that? For us, the question is more immediate. What choices are we making right now, in the properties we manage, in the ecosystems we operate inside, that will determine whether the species living here continue to do so for generations to come.
Part 2 of this series explores the wildlife of Chile’s Atacama Desert and Easter Island, two environments that produce biodiversity through entirely different mechanisms, and where the conservation challenges are as distinct as the landscapes.
Frequently Asked Questions
When is the best time to see wildlife in Costa Rica’s Arenal region?
Early mornings and late afternoons, year-round. Activity peaks in the hour after dawn and the hour before dusk, the windows when birds, primates, and sloths are most visible and most active.
How did sloths return to Nayara’s grounds?
Through the reforestation program. Sloths depend on continuous canopy cover and specific food sources. As the planted trees matured and the canopy closed, the conditions sloths require were restored. They were not introduced. They moved in when the conditions were right.
Are the dolphins in Bocas del Toro resident or migratory?
Resident. Bottlenose and spinner dolphins live year-round in the protected channels of the archipelago, which provide the calm water and prey availability that support permanent populations.
How do leatherback turtles find their nesting beaches?
Leatherbacks are believed to use geomagnetic cues to navigate back to the beaches where they hatched, sometimes returning to within meters of their original nest site after migrations of thousands of miles.
Why does light management matter for night monkeys and sea turtles?
Both species are highly sensitive to artificial light. Leatherback females will abort nesting attempts on beaches they perceive as too bright. Night monkeys require near-darkness to forage and reproduce successfully. Lighting protocols at Nayara Bocas del Toro are designed with both in mind.
What makes the reef-mangrove-rainforest system in Bocas del Toro unusual?
The level of physical and ecological overlap. In many coastal regions, these ecosystems are geographically separated. In Bocas del Toro, they are stacked on top of one another, making the interdependencies unusually direct and the consequences of disturbance in any one zone immediately felt across the others.
How much marine biodiversity depends on coral reefs?
Coral reefs cover less than one percent of the ocean floor and support roughly 25 percent of all known marine species. Their structural complexity provides habitat, nursery grounds, and feeding areas for thousands of fish and invertebrate species. The reef system in Bocas del Toro is among the most biodiverse in the western Caribbean.
Can guests observe wildlife at Nayara’s properties without disturbing it?
Yes. On-staff naturalists guide all wildlife observation at both the Arenal and Bocas del Toro properties, with protocols designed to minimize disturbance. Observation distance, timing, and behavior norms are calibrated to the specific sensitivities of each species encountered.
Sources & Further Reading
World Wildlife Day | United Nations
World Wildlife Day | Official Site
SINAC | Costa Rica National System of Conservation Areas
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute | Bocas del Toro Station
Cornell Lab of Ornithology | Neotropical Birds
IUCN | Red List of Threatened Species
NOAA Fisheries | Leatherback Sea Turtle
Florida Museum | Nurse Shark Profile
American Journal of Primatology | Night Monkey Research
Journal of Mammalogy | Sloth Ecology
ICRI | Fourth Global Bleaching Event
Nature-Based Wellness by Colors | Nayara Resorts Blog
Why Nayara Resorts Is Latin America’s Leading Luxury Brand | Nayara Resorts Blog